


Salt

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Samurai Champloo
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 09:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shino and Jin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deadcellredux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadcellredux/gifts).



Water is a wonderful means of escape -- the arc of an animal, a plunge into breathlessness, the sound of a boat rowing away. 

The smell of smoked eel and rain will forever remind Jin of things he cannot escape from; a fraught love affair with a deep lake and a boat skimming across it.

He has known ugliness more than he has known anything else: the corruption of honor, the weight of backwards modernity, the extinction of a time in which he barely had an opportunity to live.

But it is the smell of eel that has rooted him most firmly in this corporeal world, and perhaps even willingly. He knows he is young, but he never knew just quite how naive until he met Shino.

The rain seemed to last for centuries; the pit and pat on hard, heavy rooftops, the melting of paper umbrellas, the memory of hot steam wafting into a cold wet world made of sorrow, tears, inequity. 

How can one buy a person? Well, Jin has to admit in his ronin's heart of hearts, that he's been bought himself. Enough coins will ensure protection; a few more will produce a head. 

Jin has realized that he whores himself out in an identical fashion as the women he sees behind the brothel's wooden bars, though he has a choice. But sometimes, he thinks that perhaps he carries paper katanas just as Shino carried a paper umbrella. 

In the rain Jin finds that he might have the same fate that Shino had first considered of suffocation, drowning. How simple it would be, as they kick him in his sides over and over, to simply press his lips to the earth, press his nose there and kiss the mud, kiss the sad melting world that he had long ago dismissed as unworthy of his honor. So he had let his own melt into the earth like a paper parasol.

Shino says she no longer needs such things; she is enslaved, bought and paid for on a daily basis, and Jin finds that he is not in love so much as in awe. Companionship comes with a coin; but understanding cannot be bought. The closest he's come is with those two -- Mugen and Fuu -- but even then, they don't quite understand.

Purchase and paid for, like an eel curled on a stick: smoked, salted and dead.

Understanding comes in handy when Mugen has a stroke of luck, and Jin asks for a loan to reach behind the bars, to find something _beyond_ shimmying through mud and water.

Nevertheless, he does feel like an eel, when they move together; and he realizes he's weeping once they stop, even though they stop. There's something old about this ritual, even in a modern world: the rescue of a person in trouble, the honor of protection, of what is right. 

Shino is more honorable than Jin will ever be, and he knows it as he finds himself to be a maiden in distress, a woman on a bridge looking over the edge, wondering what it would be like to stop fighting, stop breathing.

Their lips nearly touch as the boat pulls away, slides off into the choppiest waters imaginable toward a distant island, and somehow, she stands there steady and tall.

He turns back to the land, and fights the urge of his own hand to kill.

What a strange thing, to have a will, to be an animal attempting to escape, to want to rise above the water's surface and breathe.

He wonders about her now, late at night when everyone else is sleeping and dreaming their own dreams, living in their own nightmares, fingers twitching as if in wait for something terrible. Jin sits and wonders about Shino; wonders whether she thinks of him, whether she remembers her abandoned umbrella, whether she resents him for leaving her.

Jin imagines a beautiful island inside his dreams; he sees eels that wriggle with the tide and swim as they please, eels that don't fall victim to quick hands and bad luck.

He smiles and weeps in these dreams -- he's not sure whether it happens in real life too when he's asleep, though neither Mugen nor Fuu have said anything -- and he confesses how terrible he finds the rain, how he too understands the urge to dive into the mud and simply smile as breath becomes a memory, how it feels to be trapped in a wooden cage or wriggle within the confines of a water-filled box, to find the world to be a prison without any one jailer.

Shino has taught Jin about the pluralities of imprisonment and freedom; how perhaps all creatures are born into bondage, whether or not trapped in a cell of their own making.

With the crash of the waves on Ikitsuki Island, Jin imagines what it is like to look out from behind wooden bars as the katana pierces him. He imagines what it is like to be the lover of a stranger, to endure the humiliation of servitude, to be sold into the slavery because of another's debt. He imagines what it is like to possess dignity, inside or outside a cage.

He arcs like an eel and accepts it, tastes the steel with his body, but he has no intention of escaping. He's relatively sure, as he wriggles on the stick, that he was salted and sold long ago; he's relatively sure as he feels the warm metallic flow of liquid in his mouth that he's tasted all he could ever imagine; he's relatively sure that he was caught before he was ever born. 

He thinks of sunflowers, of young girls in the sun, of those who have not yet met their downfall in the form of auction to the highest bidder; he thinks of Fuu, who has only sunflowers blooming in her head, of Shino who has the lap of a shore to lull her to sleep.

Jin leans and lets the blade go through him, a wriggling snack at an outdoor stand. He heaves one breath -- inhales the scent of salt and hears the crash of waves -- and exhales, smiling.


End file.
